Blurb:

Liyin Zhang and Xiaoyan Wang focus on how panelists do rapport management when expressing disagreement at conference discussions. Based on an in-depth analysis of the utterances collected from academic conference discussions in the field of linguistics, they show the strategies the panelists adopt to manage face and sociality rights and interactional goals in the activity, and investigate the influencing factors concerned. The study demonstrates that disagreement, though a risky communicative act, is not necessarily meant to be face-threatening, but rather it can be a site for the management of rapport between or among interlocutors. Panelists craftily combine the components of disagreement with other strategies to fulfil the purpose of rapport management.